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Title: A Hubble Space Telescope survey for novae in M87 – III. Are novae good standard candles 15 d after maximum brightness?

Journal Article · · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
 [1]; ORCiD logo [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [3];  [6];  [7];  [8];  [9];  [10];  [11];  [12];  [13];  [14];  [15]
  1. American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY (United States). Dept. of Astrophysics; Univ. of Cambridge (United Kingdom). Inst. of Astronomy
  2. Florida Inst. of Technology, Melbourne, FL (United States). Physics and Space Sciences Dept.
  3. American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY (United States). Dept. of Astrophysics
  4. Professional Children's School, New York, NY (United States)
  5. National Optical Astronomy Observatories, Tucson, AZ (United States)
  6. SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States). Kavli Inst. for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology
  7. Booker T. Washington Middle School, New York, NY (United States)
  8. Tel Aviv Univ., Ramat Aviv (Israel). School of Physics and Astronomy, Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences
  9. Packer Collegiate Inst., Brooklyn, NY (United States)
  10. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Epping, NSW (Australia). Astronomy and Space Science
  11. Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), Warsaw (Poland). N. Copernicus Astronomical Center
  12. California Inst. of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)
  13. Tel Aviv Univ., Ramat Aviv (Israel). Dept. of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences, Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences
  14. McMaster Univ., Hamilton, ON (Canada). Dept. of Physics & Astronomy
  15. Weizmann Inst. of Science, Rehovot (Israel). Dept. of Particle Physics and Astrophysics
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Ten weeks of daily imaging of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has yielded 41 nova light curves of unprecedented quality for extragalactic cataclysmic variables. We have recently used these light curves to demonstrate that the observational scatter in the so-called maximum-magnitude rate of decline (MMRD) relation for classical novae is so large as to render the nova-MMRD useless as a standard candle. Here in this paper, we demonstrate that a modified Buscombe–de Vaucouleurs hypothesis, namely that novae with decline times t2 > 10 d converge to nearly the same absolute magnitude about two weeks after maximum light in a giant elliptical galaxy, is supported by our M87 nova data. For 13 novae with daily sampled light curves, well determined times of maximum light in both the F606W and F814W filters, and decline times t2 > 10 d we find that M87 novae display M606W,15 = -6.37 ± 0.46 and M814W,15 = -6.11 ± 0.43. If very fast novae with decline times t2 < 10 d are excluded, the distances to novae in elliptical galaxies with stellar binary populations similar to those of M87 should be determinable with 1σ accuracies of ± 20 percent with the above calibrations.

Research Organization:
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC), Menlo Park, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-76SF00515; DEC-2013/10/M/ST9/00086; NAS 5-26555
OSTI ID:
1426168
Journal Information:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 474, Issue 2; ISSN 0035-8711
Publisher:
Royal Astronomical SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 6 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

References (25)

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Cited By (3)

Multiwavelength observations of V407 Lupi (ASASSN-16kt) – a very fast nova erupting in an intermediate polar journal July 2018
Multiwavelength observations of V407 Lupi (ASASSN-16kt) --- a very fast nova erupting in an intermediate polar text January 2018
Observations of galactic and extragalactic novae journal July 2020

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Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
techniques: imaging spectroscopy
novae
cataclysmic variables